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Songs from the Lowdown brings together music from Toronto’s street performers

Wendell Cormier is most of the way through Don Williams’s heartbreaking classic “I Believe in You”, when one of the many freight trains that travel through his west end neighbourhood goes rolling by.

Cormier, sometimes known by his stage name Woody, grins and turns his body and acoustic Fender toward the single window in his bachelor apartment to draw attention to the clatter, but the self-taught, seasoned performer doesn’t skip a beat.

The trains are something he has had to get used to, as is the bachelor apartment he currently calls home, near Lansdowne Ave. and Dupont St. Sometimes, he says, the trains make the place as loud as an airport, but he has learned to sleep through the sound.

For about 20 minutes Cormier fills the tiny room with music. One of his next songs was written by Paul Henning. It is “The Ballad of Jed Clampett”, or the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.

By the time he gets to Johnny Cash, the music is pouring out.

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“It always gets a couple songs to get into it, to get the voice going. You know what I am saying?” Cormier says. “I always do good with Johnny. You can’t lose.”

Cormier is one of six musicians featured on a newly released soundtrack, Songs from the Lowdown. Their stories and talents were featured in the 2015 documentary film Lowdown Tracks.

The styles of music range from country and Americana to blues, and what the filmmakers describe as punk hobo. The original songs on the CD are inspired by the complicated and difficult lives of the artists who wrote and play them. Most of the artists currently play in Toronto, either busking on the street, at shelters or during the occasional paying gig at a bar.

Through conversations with activist and singer Lorraine Segato viewers are guided through their stories, including Katt Budd, whose mother died in a car crash when she was a baby. Budd was in the car.

At one point in the documentary Budd walks the filmmakers through the former site of a makeshift community that people without homes created beneath the Bathurst Street Bridge.

“Everybody is gone,” Budd says in the film. “For years we had all of the couches down here and fire pits and mattresses. It was like an apartment. Every couple of pillars you could just take up a spot.”

She looks to the camera and says she doesn’t know what city officials expect people who can’t afford housing to do.

“There is no room in the shelters, you can’t stay under bridges. You can’t sleep in the park. You can’t sleep on the sidewalk. You can’t sleep in a door. I don’t know where people are going to go.”

All of the artists were given 120 copies of the CD to sell as they pleased. It can be purchased online for $16.50, or $15 at upcoming screenings of the film. All of the profits, except for a couple bucks to cover production costs, goes to the artists.

The film has been screened in more than 30 theatres, church basements and shelters across the country, with more dates to come in February. The filmmakers partnered with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, and their goal is to “move the needle” on the national conversations taking place around housing and homelessness.

Cormier was renting a sometimes freezing cold room above a bar when he was scouted for the film. His current apartment came through help from the filmmakers, who connected all the participants with people who could help them navigate the complicated process of renting in the city. Not everybody took the offer.

Cormier was born in Stephenville, N.L., the youngest boy of 12 children. As a child, he would stand and draw, another skill he taught himself, on the walls of his family home — birds on the blue walls — and sing along to Country Western Cavalcade records.

He left at 18, but was drawn back to the east coast after a few months because he “missed the salty air, woods, trees and freedom of a small town.”

Many of his problems stemmed from a period of institutionalization on the east coast during his early 20s, after he agreed to go to a hospital to seek help after the death of his father led to a frantic “energy” and “not thinking clearly.”

He says he was kept against his will for many months and subjected to abuse, isolated and overly medicated and given electroshock treatment and that the treatment only made problems worse.

It was the hospital, he said, that described him as “permanently unemployable” and misdiagnosed him with a mental illness.

Cormier wasn’t unemployable, as he later proved through the many labour jobs he has worked over the years. The work included building and renovating homes, putting in swimming pools and his longest and his favourite job of laying roofs made of copper or cedar shingles on luxury homes. He has also played an extra in films and television, he said.

“Sometimes I had to find the hardest jobs I could find, just to use up the energy and sleep,” Cormier says. “There were times I would work five days in a row, no sleep. Stay up all nights playing darts with two hands, just overwhelmed with energy.”

He did have trouble keeping a home, taking apartments when he could, sometimes living in hostels, and at one point by the Don River, though he remembers that period of his life very fondly, particularly feeding the ducks in the morning.

He said he tries to live by a simple and honourable code: including don’t lie or steal. And he makes sure to communicate daily with his creator, but is not particularly religious.

Cormier says having a home isn’t necessarily the solution for homelessness because people need a support network to keep a place to live.

“Craziness, you lose an apartment so fast out there,” Cormier says. “All it takes is the landlord saying my family wants you out.”

There is also the deep, human need for community, something you do get on the streets, he says.

“When you are living on the streets that is your backyard. You are always meeting with people,” Cormier says. “They put you in a little box and you are lost. You can get isolated.”

Songs from the Lowdown can ordered online at lowdowntracks4impact.com and the film can be viewed for free on the same website.

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